“We need bolder strategies and greater ambition.” with Mark Zwinderman

Mark Zwinderman is a strategic advisor who specialises in helping high-growth technology companies. He is CEO of SAS Environmental Services (which started as a university spinout), runs the Moonshot Factory programme at the Higgs Centre for Innovation and is a commercial champion at the University of Strathclyde. 

Mark shares his thoughts on:

• Why people and business culture matter more than the technology or product
• Longer-term support and mentoring for founders
• Where Scotland currently excels, but could do even better with bolder and more ambitious strategies 
• How to recruit and better support more commercial champions

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn

Visit the Moonshot Factory website 

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This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and The Connect-Ed Network. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. This season of Academic Adventures is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.

Transcript

Mark Zwinderman  00:00

We need bolder strategies, greater ambition, and we need to provide people with the tools and skills to actually make that a realistic possibility. The quality of the programs that Scottish Enterprise has, in combination with the universities, I haven't seen that anywhere else. Going through that process as a mentor and seeing what works, you start to realize we don't give a lot of these founders support over a sufficiently long period.

Sarah McLusky  00:31

Welcome to the Academic Adventures Podcast. This podcast is all about the journey from teaching, research and innovation to real world solutions. For season two, we are joined by experienced founders and other experts who work alongside university staff and students to help create and support culture of enterprise on campus. 

Sarah McLusky  00:50

Welcome or welcome back to the Academic Adventures podcast for episode four of our second season. I'm your host, Sarah McLusky, and our guest today is Mark Zwinderman. Mark's entrepreneurial journey began when he founded one of Scotland's first university spin out companies over 25 years ago, that company, SAS Environmental Solutions, is still going today, and mark now spends much of his time supporting fledgling entrepreneurs. He specializes in helping high growth technology companies via his moonshot factory, and is currently working with the Higgs Center for Innovation in Edinburgh and as a commercial champion for the University of Strathclyde. Mark's company really took off when he got excellent mentors, and they, in turn encouraged him to become a mentor, too. And so in our conversation, we talk about why people are so important in business, including why founders need long term support, the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and why good managers are underrated. We also talk about what Scotland does really well to support commercialization and what it could do even better. 

Sarah McLusky  01:56

Welcome along to the Academic Adventures podcast. Mark. It's fantastic to have you here. I wonder if we could begin our conversation by hearing a bit about what it is that you do and how you're involved in this academic entrepreneurship world.

Mark Zwinderman  02:10

Yeah, thanks for having me so. So how did I get involved into this? Well, I got involved in the most intense way possible, I guess, by starting a spin out from a university. This is a very long time ago, so we are talking about 2000 we were one of the very first spin outs, I believe in Scotland, somebody told me the second or the third. 

Mark Zwinderman  02:33

I don't have evidence to back that up, but that's I like the idea of being the second or the third, so I'm going with it. So we were at Napier University, and we won a Smart Award, which was £45,000. In those days, and there was no ecosystem. So we, my business partner and I showed up at a law firm, and we signed dozens of documents that we didn't really understand, probably, and we were company directors, and it was good luck and goodbye. And, you know, build your business. And so we had no mentors that I can remember. We had no advisors. It was just the two of us trying to build a business. So that company is still going and doing quite fine.

Sarah McLusky  02:33

Oh, wow. 

Sarah McLusky  03:14

So what was the, what was the business? What's the, the name of it, if you want to share it, and the kind of work that you were doing?

Mark Zwinderman  03:20

Yeah, yeah. The business is SAS Environmental Services, and we developed a chemical technology which is used to remediate and decontaminate oil contaminated waste. So we do a lot of work in South America, the Middle East, Africa, where environmental businesses use our what is now in both the washing machine and the washing powder to clean up very large oil contaminated waste sites, so 50,000 tons of waste plus up to a few million tons of waste. So that's what we spun out that business. It took us a long time to to make that work, and I think it's safe to say only when we got some really good advisors, probably 2007 that kind of time scale, did we start to make some some progress. So in 2010 I went to see a advisor and an acquaintance who works in the high growth technology sector with a business plan to get some feedback. And he was like, you don't need my feedback. You know how this stuff works by now. What I need you to do is, I need you to start talking to people who are just setting out on this path. And he invited me to contribute to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Scottish Enterprise Research and Commercialization fellowships, which was a program that ran for about 20 years, I think, in Scotland. And the idea was that you would mentor and provide workshops to academics, who would get a year's worth of salary, and they would get, you know, some commercial support and a mentor advisor. So that's in 2010 that's how I started getting people, involved in not just having a business, but supporting other people who are looking to do the same thing. 

Sarah McLusky  05:05

Oh, fantastic. So it's like you went full circle from being that academic entrepreneur and then back into helping the people who are coming through the system. So 2010, even, that's still quite a while ago. So what sorts of things have you been involved in in the interim? What has that mentoring? What sort of shape has that taken?

Mark Zwinderman  05:22

Yeah, so it started off at a fairly low level. The area of expertise I was asked to contribute was initially business development. So how do you actually start selling something when you have never sold the thing in the world, you have no customers, you have no, you don't even know who to talk to, and when you do talk to them, you don't actually know what to ask or what to say. So that's that became my starting point in this, this mentoring and support structure. Then that started to grow from there. And then I was asked by a university in Scotland to do some commercial champion work, which I think at the time, was still relatively new concept. So the idea that a pre-spin out team that is looking to spin out, that is looking to have a team that is looking to raise money to do all those things that have to be done to create a business, an established entrepreneur or somebody with a business expertise, is brought in to guide them through this process, and at the same time, negotiate with the University on behalf of the spin out, things like equity breakdowns, who gets what, and what does the license fee look like? What does the license agreement look like? And so I started to get more involved in that kind of work, and it's a lot of fun, and I enjoyed it, and so at that point, I started to build on that. And once people know that you do a good job, that you are not there for the short term, I think that's a that's a big part. I think I tend to stay in touch, work with people for a longer period of time. And that's one of the things that I think is important, you know, when we're talking about what works and doesn't work in the support of university, innovation, commercialization, the support needs to be over a longer period of time. And the RSE program was great. It was 12 months. I provide mentoring and training at the Higgs Incubator, the next to Edinburgh University, and the support we provide there is 24 months. So they get 12 months of mentoring and another 12 months because the path a lot of these deep tech companies are on simply takes a bit longer. And so I think going through that process as a mentor and seeing what works, you start to realize we don't give a lot of these founders support over a sufficiently long period. They need that consistency of support.

Sarah McLusky  07:53

That's fantastic you're able to offer that support because certainly the sorts of things that you were talking about there, you know, like contracts and intellectual property and licensing, and you know how to find customers. They're all the things that came up in the first series of this podcast that the academic entrepreneurs that we interviewed had struggled with. And because, as you say, that's the stuff that's just a whole new world. And the the your if your professional career up to that point has been doing research or teaching or whatever it is. Yeah, that that's just stuff that just doesn't even enter the consciousness, is it? And I can see why having that support over a longer period of time as well would be really valuable. Because a lot of people, I mean, I think with The Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellowship, they get completely bought out, so they get to work on it full time, but a lot of people are doing this alongside other academic duties, aren't they? So that means it does take a long time to get going.

Mark Zwinderman  08:49

It does take it always takes longer. It's always harder than people think, and it's completely new. And I think that that point is really important. I spoke to somebody very recently who pointed out that we talk a lot about funding and money and things like that, and all of that is very important. But actually the gift of time to these, these academic researchers, is probably a huge one. If you if you are senior enough, you can make time. If you think this is really important, you can find the time to pursue this kind of spin out interest. But a lot of the spin out leaders that we meet are younger researchers, and they don't always have the authority and the freedom to spend the time on doing the work that is required to commercialize, or doing the work to find out what is required to commercialize, and then when they do, they often end up in short term programs that are 8 to 12 weeks, where the idea is that they're going to be made investor ready. And anybody who's worked with university spin out teams knows that the idea that you can take somebody from an academic environment and make them investor ready in three months? Is, is, It's ridiculous in my eyes. I mean, there's the odd exception where you you might run into by accident. So they need that support to guide them through what is quite a long, drawn out process, and they need consistency of support over that whole trajectory to help guide them through it, and they develop, you know, I mean by definition, they work in an academic environment. You know, they're intelligent, motivated people. They know how to develop skills. So it's not so much about the fact that they can't do it, it's the fact that they just haven't done it yet, and our role is to help them through that process and turn them into CEOs and and founders who can tackle the problems they're going to see once, once they're out in the real world.

Sarah McLusky  10:49

Yeah, and is there any kind of selective process about the people that that you work with? Because, as you say, it's not going to be everyone who's going to succeed on this journey. So have you got a good eye for picking out the ones that you think are going to be successful, or is it just a case of helping lots of people and then seeing which ones stand the test of time?

Mark Zwinderman  11:13

Yeah I think, I mean, if I had a crystal ball, that would be a lovely one. I think it's a cliche that the people are more important than the technology of the product. It's incredibly truthful, though, cliche, and I think I if I were to say, I think resilience and getting things done are really, really important, I've learned that telling people what is true or telling people how it works, whatever that it in a business sense, is has a very low success rate. And people do have to go through it themselves. Where you see the success come from are people who are getting things done when you meet them, or the, let's say you mentor people once a month, or something. When you see people from one month to the next month. It's very, very rare they have, you know, if you could even call it, that have done what you taught them to do. That just never happens. But the really good ones are always moving forward. They are always thinking about the next step, and they are not afraid to fail. And I think that sometimes we talk about, oh, you need to fail, but actually failing is a really difficult thing to do. And when you come from an academic environment where that is even more ingrained, where you have to be successful, or your research has to be successful, you need to apply for grant funding, you need to write papers, you need to be published, the idea that you now need to publicly fail in front of your peers, in front of your colleagues, in front of the people at the university who may be telling you that this whole spin out thing is ridiculous and a waste of time, and you should just focus on the science. I think the people that you see who come through this and who are successful have the ability to go through that pain, and it is a very personal pain where you have to, you set out very publicly to do something, and then you are told by your environment that you're probably going to fail, and you still have to fail publicly, probably more than you're going to be successful. So that that learning cycle of this is something completely new. I don't know how to do this, but I'm still going to do it, and if I get it wrong, I'm just going to try again and keep doing it. And you see these people, and I'm very lucky at the moment, I mentored a few people who are like that. I couldn't tell you if their business is going to be a success. It's that depends on so many things, the technology, the market, the economy, tariffs, you name it, right? But you look at the person and you think, they'll be fine, yeah, whatever is going to whatever happens? Yeah, whatever happens. Maybe the business will be different. Maybe this business will fail, but they're going to set up another one, yeah, and number two and number three is going to be a success, because you can see that learning that's going on in their head and in their attitude and how they change their communication style. So it's very hard to pick a winner, whatever that might be up front. But I think there are elements after working with people for three to six months that you can point at and say they're exhibiting the behaviors of somebody who, who may well do very, you know, who may well do a good job at running a business and growing

Sarah McLusky  14:34

Yeah yeah, that's really interesting. And you've said that you work with this Higgs Center at the University of Edinburgh. So So tell us a bit about the center and the kinds of projects and companies that are coming through.

Mark Zwinderman  14:50

Yeah it's it's a brilliant place. So the Higgs Center for Innovation is based at the Observatory, The Royal Observatory on top of the hill. It's funded by a combination of the Science and Technology Funding Council and ESA, the European Space Agency. And so it's next to Edinburgh University. That's not officially part of Edinburgh University. So I was introduced there because I love space and my consulting advisor approach is all based around the Moonshot Method, which is all around, how do you get somebody to land on the moon and get them home safely? So they knew I was interested in it, and when they started, probably about five years ago, they only had a few companies at the time, I was asked to do some mentoring, which led to working with a space tech business, which is now doing really, really well. I ended up being a non exec chair. The company went from three to something like 25, 26 people or so raised some money, and now they're off doing really clever stuff with quantum encryption, which is quite amazing. And so the Higgs Center is, is a is a place where they provide facilities to space tech and robotics companies that need access to really cool facilities, but they're very expensive and hard to access, and they provide some financial support. They provide some office space. And then, for the past four years now, I've been working with the companies and the founders there to provide mentoring support. So we have a team of really excellent, experienced mentors that work as advisors with those companies, and we do a series of workshops throughout the year, all trying to link those into this concept of a moonshot, trying to get people to think more ambitiously, to get people to think bigger, and then to try and connect that to, okay, if you are thinking bigger, where could you be in seven years time? Where could you be in 10 years time? And how do we connect that back to today? And what do you need to work on over the six to 12 months that are coming up to move you closer to a much more ambitious call, because these people are really, really clever. They've got fantastic technologies, anything from avionics for rockets to seagrass planting robots that can protect our coastlines and sequester carbon dioxide. And it's just fantastic to work with people like that. But unless they have an impact, unless they scale, they never will have an impact on this, this this planet and this society. So that's I tend to be quite a difficult task master. I think in that they, I feel they have a responsibility to be more ambitious in how they're going about it.

Sarah McLusky  17:40

Yeah well, as you say, it's this it is almost this responsibility of these technologies exist, and they could make things better, but it's bridging that gap and actually getting them out into the world and getting them used. And yeah, so having somebody like you to help them along the way, I'm sure, makes a big difference. So one thing that that, you know, it sounds like some of the work you're doing is is probably the kind of best practice, but what sorts of things do you think are currently happening in Scotland, in the Higgs center, that are the right kinds of things to help encourage entrepreneurship, and where maybe could we be doing things a little bit better?

Mark Zwinderman  18:21

That's good question. I think there's a lot of really good things in Scotland. I lived in Scotland for 25, 26 years, and very recently, moved down south. So just live just north of Oxford at the moment. And it's interesting, because I think once you leave, let's call it the ecosystem. Once you leave a place, you get a different perspective on it than when you're living in it. And I love Scotland. Scotland is my home. You know, it's when I see the big flag, when I drive up the motorway and my heart skips a beat. So, um, it's always going to be Scotland for me. But it's interesting when you when you move away, you start to see things that maybe, when I lived in Scotland, I was a bit frustrated with the ecosystem. I felt certain things weren't going very well. But then when you move somewhere else, you realize that's actually very good. So one of the big, big powerhouses in Scotland, there's two big powerhouses in Scotland, as far as I can see. One is the university system, and the other one is Scottish Enterprise. I think the universities in Scotland are by and large, there are some exceptions, but by and large, the universities are very, very good at supporting people who want to spin out. It's not perfect. It could always be better. But what I've seen in other parts of the UK and in other countries, I think in general, the universities are doing a pretty good job. Scottish Enterprise is always going to be a difficult organization in the sense that they are politically funded. There's a bunch of goals and targets that they have that go well beyond the innovation side that we're talking about today, and it's always going to be public money that has been used to support what is really highly entrepreneurial, incredibly risky startup, spin out activity. So there's always going to be a stress between these two, but I think, having worked as an advisor for the Scottish Enterprise as well over the past years, and having been lucky enough to work as a commercial champion, the quality of the programs that Scottish Enterprise has in combination with the universities to provide this high growth spin out support, I haven't seen that anywhere else. And I've spoken to people in other countries in Europe, in the States, in England, and you explain what's going on, and you see people taking notes. And I've introduced people from other European countries to people in Scottish Enterprise to have these conversations on, how do you how do you have a bit of a staged process? You give people a little bit of funding to go out and investigate if there's a market, if there is some commercial potential, then you get the opportunity qualification stage, where you work with a team and they get some commercial experience to help do that investigation to company creation where the aim is to set up a business is a brilliant path. There are, I think, at the moment, some limitations to how that is being executed, but again, it's difficult to to slant that entrepreneurial, high risk and public money thing together, so I'm overall very positive. I think that's a very strong role that they play in commercializing innovation.

Sarah McLusky  21:50

Fantastic. It's great to know that that's something that is proving to be really helpful. But then thinking about things that maybe you think could be a little bit better, or where there are gaps in the system, or whether there's more support needed? What do you think?

Mark Zwinderman  22:06

So I think it's an interesting one. The there's a lot of activity, and there's a lot of events in Scotland now about startups and entrepreneurship and founders and pitching. So I think a lot of the attention in my eyes is focused on a few elements in that which is pitching value proposition, the excitement of having a startup. I don't think we talk a lot about the requirements of building scaling businesses. I don't think we spend enough time building the tools and the infrastructure and the skills and the qualities that you need to create scaling companies. We talk a lot about scale ups, but a scale up needs management. Scale up needs really good managers. The UK in general, that's not a Scottish problem, but the UK in general, has very negative attitude towards managers. Whenever there's cutbacks in businesses, or the NHS, or you name it, there's always like, oh, we should cut the managers, because the managers are just a waste of time and money. But if you look at really successful businesses, they tend to have really strong people management, and they translate strategy and vision into a good culture, they help translate and motivate people. So I think we don't spend enough time talking about that, attached to that kind of scaling side of things is being bolder and being more ambitious. And that is definitely something I noticed when I moved down south. I was talking to a number of people about their business planning and their vision. And when you go down to London, when you go to Oxford, Cambridge, the level of ambition of founders overall is much, much more substantial than what you would see in Scotland. And that's partly a cultural issue, and it's partly an investor problem. So I had meetings with investors in Scotland where the reply was that sounds great. That's lovely. You know, don't want to be too ambitious, because we want to make sure it's realistic. And the same pitch in London gets a response of that is completely uninteresting, like that looks like a mom and pop business that you're trying to build there. What are you really trying to do? So unless you can put two zeros or three zeros at the end of that projection, this isn't even interesting for us to look at. And I think we need a bit more ambition in Scotland. We need bolder strategies. We need greater ambition, and we need to provide people with the tools and skills to actually make that a realistic possibility, because we need more bigger companies. We we spend a huge amount of money spinning out and starting up businesses, but they get sold too early. They either don't grow at all, so they kind of flatline and really slowly grow over a 10 year period. Or companies are a success and they get sold after three or four years, or they just disappear. And I think we need to keep hold of these businesses, and we need to grow them, because growing businesses generate jobs and high quality ones. So that's what I would say. We need to be bolder, and we need to provide, you know, more scale up support.

Sarah McLusky  25:27

It's fascinating that perspective that for you, yeah, having gotten gone away and now almost looking a little bit from the outside and comparing it to other people, yeah, the difference, I wouldn't, I guess I'm not surprised that the overall disparity, but that it's so marked, I think, surprises me definitely. And so I'm sure one thing that that could really help is having more people like you involved in helping to support these kinds of spin out businesses. So what do you think can be done to help encourage more people like you to get involved.

Mark Zwinderman  26:04

Yeah, I couldn't agree more there. I think the there's a number of things. I think the commercial champion role is absolutely brilliant, and you can see the value that it adds. I've been very lucky to do a number of projects and to participate in some amazing technologies and work with just fantastic people. The last year or so, there's only so many commercial champions, and I think that there's two sides to this. I think on the one hand, the role of the commercial champion needs to be a bit more flexible. I see where the angle is coming from, which is we want experienced business people to take on a leading role in these spin out companies. But actually, what we really want is to take young academics and let them be the MD and the CEO, and train them and guide them and surround them with support, because it's very difficult to find people who want to join as a commercial champion and then join their business as a CEO. That also leads to a really serious problem of when you do find good commercial champions, and they do join as a CEO, you lose them as a commercial champion for another project. And because the system works so well, because the high growth spin out scheme is so strong and so successful, there is this pipeline of brilliant University projects, great universities, great projects. Scottish Enterprise has come up with this really brilliant scheme. But what it means is we need a lot of commercial champions and advisors to help. So I think we need to be a bit more flexible in maybe not having one, but maybe having two or three people on a project that have different skills to bring to that project. And I think we need to, we need to train some of these advisors. I've met a number of people over the past the past year, who have amazing skill sets, they have amazing careers. They would be amazing commercial champions for university spin out projects, but they have no idea how Scottish Enterprise works. When Scottish Enterprise can be a little bit of a strange beast in how it handles grant funding and things around it. It's just you need to learn how to handle that. And second, the role of mentoring and advising the startup or a spin out is something that does require some support as well. So we have this, this big pool of people who have either an amazing contacts in industry, who understand perhaps, how to work in a big corporate environment, or who are senior enough that they can pick up the phone and open the right door for a spin out business, and they just need a little bit of guidance themselves as to what is actually expected of them. And so I think we need to spend a little bit of time on talking to people who have great careers and saying, Look, this is something that is tremendous fun. It's really rewarding. And you can actually point at it and say, I helped that company, I was a contributor, to factor in their success. And so I think a little bit of a training of the trainers, if that would be the short way to put it,

Sarah McLusky  29:28

Yeah, yeah. That sounds like it would be really, really useful and help to not not only help people step into these roles, but also help them to do it confidently, and as you say, make the right sort of difference at the right time to these spin out companies to help them to grow fantastic. I think we should think about wrapping up our conversation now, just for the time. So if people want to find out more about you or the projects that you work in, where routes would you invite them to go?

Mark Zwinderman  29:58

The best is probably LinkedIn. If you type my name into LinkedIn, you won't find another one. I seem to be the only one with this combination of first and last name. So yeah, LinkedIn, I'm quite active on LinkedIn. It's where I tend to share my thoughts on strategy, how to create a Moonshot Program and how to connect. You know what is a 5 to 10 year goal to how you get up on Monday morning and it's raining, you don't really want to get out of bed. Once you connect those two, that's the place to go and to find my musings for what they are, and to get in touch with me. If people want to speak to me directly,

Sarah McLusky  30:36

Fantastic. I will get a link and put that in the show notes so people can find you there. So it just remains to thank you so much for coming along being part of the Academic Adventures Podcast. I'm sure those insights are going to be really useful for people. Thank you. 

Mark Zwinderman  30:49

Thank you very much for having me. 

Sarah McLusky  30:53

If you've been inspired by this podcast, head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You'll find a link in the show notes, or just search for the Academic Adventures podcast. This podcast is a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky, working in partnership with Ross Tuffee and the Connect-Ed Network. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me Sarah McLusky. This season of the Academic Adventures podcast is supported by the Scottish Funding Council.